Thursday, December 15, 2016

Mexican Report Says Investigators Botched Search for 43 Students

In April, members of the families of 43 college students who disappeared in 2014 and their supporters marched in Mexico City.Credit
Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press

MEXICO
CITY — The Mexican government has refused to release an internal review
that found investigators broke the law in their search for 43 missing
students, a conclusion that threatens the legal foundations of a case
that has roiled Mexico.

The
report says crucial suspects were arrested and moved illegally,
throwing into question any evidence they provided. The investigators’
conduct, in the words of the government report, violated “the right to
truth” and damaged the victims’ right to justice.

The
students’ disappearance from the southern city of Iguala in September
2014 remains an open wound in Mexico, evidence of the country’s failure
to protect its citizens and impunity within a corrupt criminal justice
system.

Now the report provides the first evidence from inside the attorney general’s office showing how the case was mishandled.

The
internal review was completed four months ago, 177 pages printed out
and ready for delivery to the students’ parents. The families arrived
expectantly for a meeting with the attorney general on Aug. 18, bearing
posters of their missing sons.

But
the inspector general of the attorney general’s office told them that
his superiors needed to approve the report first, which he said was a
simple formality. That approval never came. Instead, the report is still
under study, according to the attorney general’s office, which gave no
indication when it would be finished, if ever.

The inspector general who prepared the review, César Alejandro Chávez Flores, abruptly resigned four weeks after that meeting.

A
copy of the report obtained by The New York Times suggests why it
remains in bureaucratic limbo. It depicts a series of violations,
including the government’s top investigator’s taking a suspect to
identify the supposed crime scene without a defense lawyer present.

A record of that visit was never placed in the case file, and the site was left unguarded overnight.

The
existence of the internal report, and that of the first draft of a
broader audit by the inspector general’s office, were first made public
by the magazine Proceso and by the investigative journalist Anabel
Hernández in a book about the case.

The
choice not to approve the report and release it to the families “was a
clear sign of a lack of political will, not only from the attorney
general’s office but from the federal government, to finish the internal
investigation,” said Santiago Aguirre, deputy director of the Miguel
Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center in Mexico City and the families’
legal representative.

“It
showed us that the inspector general tried to do honest work and that
he couldn’t find the political and institutional conditions to carry his
work to its final consequences,” Mr. Aguirre added.

But
the attorney general’s office said legal reasons prevented it from
releasing the report. The inspector general who succeeded Mr. Chávez
Flores did not “recognize” the report’s conclusions because it lacked
unspecified required formalities.

“As
such, it is a document that is legally nonexistent,” a spokeswoman,
Natalia Briseño, wrote in an email. She added that the review was
continuing.

The
possibility that the report will be suppressed is a worry for the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is evaluating the
case’s progress and has pressed the government to open new lines of
investigation.

“We’re
quite concerned and disturbed about the allegations raised recently,”
said the commission’s president, James L. Cavallaro. He added that the
review was “clearly an important document, and we hope and expect to
receive it.”

The
students were part of a larger group of young men who were studying to
become rural teachers at a college in the village of Ayotzinapa, in the
Pacific state of Guerrero.

They
had arrived in Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, to commandeer buses to travel
to Mexico City a few days later. But as the five buses left the city,
municipal police officers attacked them and three students were killed.
The police also attacked a bus carrying teenage soccer players, killing
three more people, apparently mistaking their bus for one of the
students’ buses.

During a chaotic night,
students traveling on two buses disappeared, hauled off by the police
and, officials have said, handed over to the local drug gang, Guerreros
Unidos.

The
government’s account of what happened next rests on a series of
confessions from suspected drug hit men who said they had killed the
students and burned their bodies on a giant pyre in a remote garbage
dump. The next day, they scooped the ashes into plastic bags and threw
them into the nearby San Juan River.

Only one student’s remains have been identified from the charred bones found at the riverbank.

But
the inspector general’s report describes how six suspects, picked up in
different locations in one day, spontaneously confessed with identical
wording that they were members of Guerreros Unidos, and admitted to
having killed the students and burning the remains.

The
subsequent arrests, based only on those statements, were arbitrary and
illegal, the review said. Under the Mexican Constitution, an illegal
arrest nullifies any evidence obtained as a result.

There
were other problems. Dates were muddled, records missing. An
investigating prosecutor signed documents in two different places on the
same day.

What the report describes is not uncommon in Mexican criminal investigations, experts say.

In
their zeal to close cases, the Mexican police and prosecutors have long
skirted the law. Suspects are picked up to give a statement and then
held on the slimmest of proof on suspicion of ties to organized crime.

Although
the police are adapting to a broad overhaul in Mexico’s justice system
intended to eliminate those practices, “old habits die hard,” said
Agustín Acosta, a prominent criminal defense lawyer who is not involved
in the students’ case.

The
day after the arrests, one suspect was released to the lead
investigator, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, who flew him to the river. There,
the suspect later said, he was told to point to a spot on the riverbank.

None of the activities of that day — Oct. 28, 2014 — were included in the case file.

Mr.
Zerón’s presence at the river with the suspect, Agustín García Reyes,
was first noted by a group of outside experts from the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights.

Among
the experts’ findings, which they presented in April, was detailed
evidence that 17 suspects were tortured, including Mr. García Reyes and
two other suspected gang members detained the same day.

The
inspector general’s internal investigation was a response to the
experts’ report. The attorney general at the time, Arely Gómez, also
asked the inspector general to begin the broader audit. The Times has
obtained a copy of the audit’s first draft.

Ms. Gómez is now the federal comptroller.

Mr.
Zerón has said the riverbank visit was appropriate police procedure.
The omission of that visit in the case file was inadvertent, he said.

In September, he resigned
as the head of criminal investigations at the attorney general’s
office. But Mr. Zerón, who has worked closely with President Enrique
Peña Nieto for almost a decade, was immediately appointed as the
technical secretary of the National Security Council.

The
first draft of the broader audit raises many of the same questions that
the experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights first
identified. It asks why the federal police and the local military
battalion stood by while the municipal police attacked the students’
buses.

The
draft calls for further investigation and interrogations to determine
whether that negligence amounts to obstruction of justice.

One
of the enduring mysteries of the case is why the municipal police were
never stopped by the state and federal authorities in Iguala.

If
the state police had acted, the students and others who were attacked
that night “would not have been injured or killed” the way they were,
the draft concludes.

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2016, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Mexican Report Says Investigators Botched Search for 43 Students. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe